Appalachian Elegy by bell hooks, University of Kentucky Press, 2012
I plowed through this book in search of mountain mystery and wound up feeling a bit preached to, well and good, I am a willing parishioner in the church of between-times, of horizon-line nature and improvised reclamation, of ecofeministic resurrection. Perhaps I was looking for a different book. Perhaps I expected poems when I should have been looking for poetry; the book, after all, is subtitled “Poetry and Place,” and there is poetry in these utterances that more often swerve into pure lamentation than linger in the poem-space, diaristic out-of-time dislocations of place and the records of life held within. Poems, yes, but I faltered at the label “poem.” Until I reached book’s end and ran into the Index of First Lines, an unexpected inclusion which jarred me out of the rhythmic monotony of these quilted elegies, which suddenly flung me into the “wild” hooks speaks of in the volume’s introduction. Here, then, in this unexpected tangle of organizational metonymy, was the poem I sought, the mystery. Such bouquets of image:
mammoth caves migrating birds morning dawn mud sliding down my world is green
Or in the N’s, so simply:
night moves no crops grow
Beautiful. Or this passage in the S-section:
sometimes falling rain stained black stark stolen sky star of david straight ahead
Or back to the beginning, where the A’s go additive:
again and again all fields all old souls autumn ending
My favorite, though, is the whole of the W’s:
walking the long way home when the dawn when trees die wilderness within winds of fate wingspan wide with water
The Collective by Kim Gordon, Matador Records, 2024
O iconic receptacle of denaturing peristalsis, O perverse asphyxiation, O drunk gut that should go away but doesn’t, O starlet sucking words, O LCD skin, O blank ellipses, O shoplifted child, O author’s bio scrawled in restroom stall, O Warhol, O Warhol’s head in a jar of formaldehyde, O absence like a spent flower, O frame of magic numbers, O oxygen, O radiant wig!